[bitc-dev] Rationale for unboxed mutability in BitC?

[Sam Mason]

On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 03:38:19PM +0100, David Hopwood wrote:
> Or is there some other argument for unboxed mutability in the
> semantics that I'm missing?

I see two main arguments leading to it:

 1. If BitC is going to be used in the kernel then you need to be able to
    make guarantees about how things are organised in memory (i.e. the
    page tables in an Intel processor need to structured correctly).
    Making these guarantees when you have an unpredictable (to anyone
    except the author of the optimiser) middle man is difficult.

 2. Fancy optimisers make for lots of non-trivial code and lots code
    means even more proof (which is going to be difficult enough even
    for a small compiler).


  Sam